Three years after Fukushima, Vermonters are cautioned over energy

A commitment to asking difficult questions emerges as a cornerstone to sound, safe energy policy at a recent forum in Vermont, three years after '3/11'

Mar. 15, 2014

Shonhei Ayabe, 21, displays paintings created after the March 11, 2011, earthquake/tsunami in Japan by young Japanese schoolchildren and British artist Geoff Read. Ayabe, an exchange student from Kokugakuin University in Tokyo, took part in a forum Tuesday night at St. Michael's College that focused on the nuclear reactor meltdowns in Fukushima. / JOEL BANNER BAIRD/FREE PRESS

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Free Press Staff Writer

Takahiro Uemura, 21, displays paintings created after the March 11, 2011 earthquake/tsunami in Japan by young Japanese schoolchildren and British artist Geoff Read. Uemura, an exchange student from Kokugakuin University in Tokyo, took part in a forum Tuesday night at St. Michael's College that focused on the nuclear reactor meltdowns in Fukushima. / JOEL BANNER BAIRD/FREE PRESS

After-images from Fukushima

British artist Geoff Read was living in Fukushima prefecture when the earthquake/tsunami struck on March 11, 2011. His collaboration with children in the aftermath of that disaster yielded drawings and paintings — first executed by schoolchildren, and then embellished with portraits by Read. More artwork, poems, a video and stories behind the images can be found on Read’s “Strong Children Japan” website: http://bit.ly/FukushimaArt.

Last week, on the third anniversary of the “3/11” earthquake and tsunami along eastern Japan, a gathering at St. Michael’s College in Colchester explored the disaster’s aftershocks.

Distant as we are in Vermont from the coastal flooding and the three Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdowns, none of us remain untouched, the speakers said.

Geiger counters tell a tiny part of the story. Airborne radiation from the accident has long since settled around the globe, albeit in doses experts tell us are benign.

Wreckage from Fukushima, some of it radioactive, is scheduled to reach the U.S. coast this spring. Again, at a potency thought to be relatively dilute.

Health risks remain high in some parts of Japan.

Elsewhere in the world, the speakers said, the fallout from Fukushima is more subtle: shaping, with growing urgency, the discussion of long-term improvements to energy efficiency, conservation, safety and security.

The evening’s unsung stanza was the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant in Vernon. No one mentioned the accumulated concerns over reliability and safety that preceded the plant’s scheduled closure this year.

Small potatoes, perhaps, compared with Fukushima.

In the name of catastrophes past (and those that surely will erupt), the speakers advocated for a culture of assertive curiosity. They also mapped out some obstacles toward that goal.

By turns, they outlined global shifts in post-Fukushima activism, diplomacy and trade. And they urged the audience of about 50 to engage with those shifts sooner rather than later.

Close-ups

Speaker Jason Bartashius, a St. Michael’s Class of 2004 alumnus, had an early heads-up: He was in the middle of an English lesson with Japanese schoolchildren when he felt the earthquake.

In Kyoto, a safe distance from the coast, the kindergarten students considered the quake “an amusement park ride,” Bartashius said.

It took several days for the immensity of the damage, coupled with the disruption of mass evacuations, to sink in for him.

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More than 18,500 people died in the coastal areas. Many parts of Japan played host to refugees from destroyed or contaminated zones.

Constrained by finances, Bartashius was unable to drop his work and volunteer. But neither could he bring himself to leave the country.

“I wanted to stay in Japan. I had a job lined up; I had friends,” Bartashius said. He continued to work, and he struggled with long-distance, Web-based teaching projects before plugging directly into local activism.

Among his fellow activists was another expatriate, British artist Geoff Read, whose collaborative paintings and drawings with young Fukushima evacuees were displayed at the St. Michael’s College forum Tuesday night.

The images unambiguously convey hope, discomfort, fear and escape.

In many other first-hand encounters, Bartashius found that the Japanese faith in nuclear power had been shaken to its core — at least temporarily.

As the collective shock subsided, Bartashius discovered that many political and economic interests were eager to resume Japan’s commitment to nuclear power, which had been generating about a third of the country’s electricity before 3/11.

He found common cause with those who felt that the region’s seismic instability (Japan sits along the Pacific Ring of Fire) poses too great a risk: “It was time to work for structural change,” he said.

He’s planning to go back to Japan this spring, as a doctoral student in global studies at Sophia University in Tokyo.

Bartashius’ willingness to cross national boundaries is a fitting strategy for addressing natural and man-made disasters, said Jeff Ayres, who chairs the Political Science Department at St. Michael’s.

Activism constrained to a strictly national agenda too easily ignores mounting threats to global security, Ayres added: “What happened in Japan is not just a Japanese problem.”

More secrets?

Japan’s quest for secure energy sources has been problematic since the late 1800s, Eric Johnston, deputy editor for the Japan Times in Osaka, said at the St. Micheal’s event.

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And, partly because the country relies on imports for about 90 percent of its fuel, the post-3/11 government has taken a sharp, no-nonsense turn toward expedience and national security, said Johnston, who has lived in Japan for 26 years.

“The Japanese constitution goes out of its way to protect freedom of speech,” he said, “but nothing about open government.”

The State Secrets Law, implemented last year, is the centerpiece of “a political system, I am sad to say, that is getting worse,” Johnston said.

Paralleling the U.S. Patriot Act in some respects, the new law makes it easier for officials to classify information, to punish whistleblowers and to intimidate journalists, scholars and activists for “designated harmful activities,” Johnston said.

The law’s passage was discussed scarcely in public — until a popular television actress tweeted her dismay at new constraints to “truth-telling.”

Despite some grassroots opposition, Johnston believes the State Secrets Law will place behind closed doors many official decisions that weigh competing interests of public safety, living standards and private enterprise.

The country’s surviving 51 nuclear reactors, curtailed out of caution to only a token contribution of power to the national grid, sit in regulatory limbo.

Not for long, Johnston predicts: As imports of coal and liquified natural gas have surged, the nuclear lobby is working to get more reactors back on line and to increase significantly the number of plants.

The U.S., a key advocate for Japan’s nuclear program since Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” initiative in the early 1950s, is watching and waiting.